Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
A site that has been providing me with a significant portion of my business has been in the penalty-box since early january. Now, I have tried *anything* a sane human could think of to fix the issue, but my reconsideration requests just go unanswered.
First of all, I am absolutely 100% certain I am dealing with a penalty. A search for my domain (in the style of 'keyword-info.tld'), with the tld omitted will put me somewhere at page 6. Other tlds with the same domain (not owned and/or operated by me) do show up on page one as they should, but their tlds dont match the country I'm targeting. So a penalty it is. Here's a list of things I tried:
- Fix trailing slash duplicate content issue through a 301
- Fix 'index.php' duplicate content issue through a 301
- Fix 'www' subdomain canonical duplicate content issue through a 301
- Remove all defective and/or thematically irrelevant links
- Added a privacy policy
- Added a creativecommons licensing statement
- Checked robots.txt -> nothing wrong
- Checked safebrowsing tool -> nothing wrong
- Checked meta tags -> nothing wrong
- Added noindex,follow to news index and category pages
- Added rel="nofollow" to a button of a thematically relevant high-quality top50 listing
- I NEVER purchased or sold a SINGLE link
- I added 'nofollow' to my free thematic business listing, just in case G might be thinking I'm selling these positions.
- Built a couple of nice high-quality links through guest posting.
- Added new quality content on a regular basis
- Added a tagcloud to improve crawlability
- Added a great deal of relevant wikipedia-like internal linking (as per Ronburk's classic post [webmasterworld.com])
- Added noindex,follow on the individual tag-pages to prevent duplicate content
- Added the new canonical tag (yep, I am desperate)
- Removed interlinking (it was only minor anyways)
So, did I miss anything? I have to say that several external sites display one or more of my content pages. However, these pages all contain backlink to my site, signaling to Google that my site is the original content provider. Note that we are talking about maybe three of four sites that each display a single page of my content. Should I ask these webmasters to take down my content or replace it with an excerpt? I'm not really sure whether this is the culprit, since I have another site which has been penalized in the same way at the same time. This site however does not have any copies of its content floating around and is thematically completely unrelated to the first site.
As you can see, I'm running out of options. As it stands now, my site is insanely clean. On-site duplicate content is virtually non-existant and all other technical issues are ironed out (gzip compression is on etc.). Any ideas?
So seeing candidate sitelinks in WMT but not the SERPs isn't something to be concerned about. Many sites see that but don't see sitelinks even on a search for [example.com].
If having correct sitelinks implies one thing, it's at least that my site is well crawlable. I figure this makes it less likely that I'm dealing with a technical issue.
Or, in less parable terms: Google has a business plan. That plan might not fit all, but they are stuck with it until the market changes.
- Your site might never have had a problem to begin with. It might have been one of those Google's freak collateral damage issues that landed you in the soup.
- You correctly identified the issue, cleaned it up, filed a request, but you are in the mandatory penalty period, which you don't know is how long and when will it end.
- You haven't identified the problem or have partly addressed it and Google wants you to do more, a fact you are not aware of and are waiting endlessly for the penalty to end.
- It might never have been a penalty by Google's definition, but an algorithmic tweak that has affected a select set of keywords. If the overall traffic hasn't been affected drastically, perhaps a perceived penalty might belong to this category.
- Your site is affected (penalized or algorithmically tweaked), you undertake damage control efforts, file a request to Google citing what might have been the problem that you addressed, which might be a news to Google! So, they use the stick you gave to beat you.
It might just be best to clean up issues that you are aware of, as netmeg suggested, take help of an expert to review and let rest to destiny.
What I have learned:
- Issues on one domain might well affect your other domains (don't know if shared IP comes into play here)
- Be as elaborate as you can in your reconsideration request
- If you're innocent and your site really deserves a second chance; don't give up.
- The 'domain-tld' is still a reliable indicator
- Link exchanges suck.
- Don't mess with Google, their guidelines are for real ;)
What I do know, is that I removed two old spammy sites from the same IP just before I filed my request. This was relevant, because these sites where previously (up to ~4 months ago, before penalty-time) interlinked with my main site. They were in the same general field, but just touched upon a different niche. I mentioned the deleting of this old junk in my request, in an effort to come clean as much as I could. Guess that worked. All in all, the penalty was imposed early january, so I figure I've been pretty quick getting in and out of penalty hell.
If you want to know what I did, see the OP and add 'remove old spammy sites related to your site' to that list. It's basically a recipe for getting out of penalty hell, given you don't have major external dupe issues.
Maybe I am one of the lucky few, but in the end I feel this has been a positive experience. I've certainly learned a *lot* these past two months.
